INTRODUCTION

DISPATCHES FROM DYSTOPIA, dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved during the past eight years from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has become precisely what this blog's new title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963.
¶Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.”
¶Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn.
¶But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care.
¶Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad.
¶Moreover our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp.
¶Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.
¶Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world.
But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises.
¶Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

"...our relentless subjugation by capitalism..."We the People have been reduced to slavery and serfdom by Capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression for all the rest of us -- and the CIA's Operation Chaos exemplifies Capitalism's darkest and most malevolent aspects.

These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including two books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

Best Site for Suppressed Assassination FactsThe late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.

Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)

Communist Labor Party Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.

Consortium News Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.

der SpiegelMainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.

Global ResearchA genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.

Gun Owners of America Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.

International Marxist Archive All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.

RTFormerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.

Second Amendment FoundationUnmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.

Socialist Worker Best Marxist website in the United States (never mind its purely ideological essays reflect only Leon Trotsky's viewpoint), with news reporting and analysis that is far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.

Southern Poverty Law CenterBest source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.

Theocracy WatchCornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).

Unless otherwise noted, all material herein is copyrighted by Loren Bliss and/or Dispatches from Dystopia. Reproduction for non-profit purposes is permitted as long as it identifies the author or photographer and includes a link to the original text. To arrange for-profit reproduction, contact Loren Bliss via the comment facility.

07/12/2017

EXPLANATORY RANT (AKA PREFATORY WHINING): because I am more jammed up than ever – not only the time normally consumed by the monthly newsletter I edit and produce as an unpaid volunteer for the low-income senior housing complex in which I live, but as never before has happened during the newsletter's production week, the time stolen by the excruciatingly painful labor of preparing for the federally mandated quarterly premises inspection by which our overlords ensure we impoverished tenants are spit-in-our-faces reminded of our place as subhuman, god-cursed garbage near the very bottom of Biblical Capitalism's malicious caste system – the text accompanying the following links will be unusually abbreviated, for which I apologize in advance.

My alternative is to post no Dispatches at all until Sunday, a surrender to circumstance I am not willing to make, never mind the necessarily thorough pre-inspection housecleaning damns me to give it approximately 18 of the hours I would normally devote to volunteer journalism. Thus instead of sitting comfortably at my deskreading and thinking and writing as I would be doing either in relaxed mode for the newsletter or at peak intensity for Dispatches, I am forced by the looming inspection to sufferthe truly agonizing bending and twisting the cleaning chores inflict on my officially disabled 77-year-old flesh, my disability the legacy of long-ago back, shoulder and knee injuries that were formerly dormant but which about a decade ago became hopelessly arthritis-inflamed and will therefore remain inescapably painful until my sufferings are at last relieved by the total anesthesia that is the one great blessing of death. Plus there's the oppressive sense of exhaustion that is the consequence of both the intensified pain and the breathlessness – the chief symptom of my slowly but steadily worsening congestive heart failure – that like some monstrous leaden straitjacket crushes my chest whenever I engage in unaccustomed exertion, as is required by scrubbing a dirty linoleum floor or cleaning rugs the thickly woven material of which makes vacuuming nearly as difficult as mowing tall grass with a very dull version of an old-fashioned hand-powered mower.

As they really do say in the theater whether on Broadway or off – this from the actresses I dated during my Manhattan prime – “the show must go on.” Hence, without further ado, here's the news:

CAPITALIST POLITICIANS AGAIN SHOW THEIR PLUTOCRATIC HATEFULNESS, this time by reducing the minimum wage and imposing statewide legislation that prohibits minimum wage hikes by any of the given states' cities or counties. An additional report is here.

NAOMI KLEIN'S AWAKENING, LIKE THAT OF THE USIAN LEFT IN GENERAL,amounts to re-inventing the wheel that was first invented by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Nevertheless it makes for encouraging reading.

THEOCRAT PENCE MEETS WITH FELLOW MISOGYNISTS BUTrefuses to disclosewhat was discussed or which JesuNazis participated in the discussions.

TRUMP'S CIVIL RIGHTS HONCHO BUILT HIS CAREER ON MISOGYNY AND HATRED OF LGBTQ PEOPLE, a no-surprise appointment by the ever-more-brazenly theocratic regime that has already resurrected the traditionally Christian claims of divine-right sadism and hatefulness.

IN YET ANOTHER ATROCITY OF THE JESUNAZI WAR AGAINST WOMEN, the USian Supreme Court has revived a Wisconsin law that effectively criminalizes pregnancy by anyone who is adjudged to be alcoholic or drug addicted.

WORTHWHILE READING (I): Consortiumnews.com, vital reports on the Empire's interaction with the civilized world, linked to the website rather than any specific report because all its contents are relevant.

WORTHWHILE READING (II): Global Research News, more vital national and international news reports, linked to the website as above.

WORTHWHILE READING (III):CounterPunch.org, still more vital national and international news reports, linked to the website as above.

WORTHWHILE READING (IV):The Stand, the Washington State Labor Council's online daily, linked to this edition of the publication rather than any specific report because most of its contents are relevant no matter where we live.

WORTHWHILE LISTENING: Black Agenda Radio, linked to this week's programming because all of its broadcasts are as relevant to politically conscious Working Class whites as they are to African-Americans.

HERE IS THE SPEECH THAT WAS CENSORED BY JESUNAZI TERRORISTS IN SEATTLE.It was resurrected by its author, Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, at the Socialist 2017 conference last week in Chicago.

THE ASSAULT AGAINST MEDICAID MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS REFUSING TO COVER, this by regulatory restrictions that proclaim an ever-increasing number of people ineligible for the care it provides.

TWO VITAL REPORTS ON NORTH KOREA, firstly that its most recent launch was not an ICBM, secondly that the real threat to world peace is – you guessed it – not North Korea but rather the USian Empire and its Hitler-on-steroids schemes for global conquest.

SEATTLE CITY COUNCIL UNANIMOUSLY ENACTS A DEFIANT LOCAL INCOME TAX, a long-overdue “fuck you” to the Democrats and Republicans who maintain North America's most savagely regressive state tax code and are already filing suit against the city.

READER SUPPORTED NEWS DESPERATELY NEEDS DONATIONS LEST IT DROP DEAD. As Dispatches readers know, RSN provoked my editorial disdain when it became so rabidly Hillaryite, it was almost indistinguishable from the Democratic (sic) National Committee's own propaganda organ. Indeed I suspect that's the reason for the apparent donation-boycott that has now reached the point it is jeopardizing RSN's survival. But RSN is unquestionably recovering from its Hillaryite dementia, which is why these days nearly every edition of Dispatches contains at least one link to RSN reports. And this – perhaps the most poignantly eye-opening essay RSN has published this year – exemplifies why the site is worth preserving. Please, if you can afford to do so, help sustain it.

RESPONSIVE RANT ABOUT LAST SUNDAY'S MUSIC: a local reader asked me how it is I know about Paul Robeson's long-censored performances. The answer is, the songs to which I linked – now resurrected by the Internet (and yet another reason to defend Net Neutrality with the greatest and most relentless nonviolent ferocity possible) – were part of the music of my earliest childhood. This included the 78-rpm original of Robeson's Songs of Free Men and the imported 78-rpm, five-record album by the Red Army Chorus. (The latter required a change of Victrola needles for best listening because the grooves of European records were V-shaped while the grooves of USian records were U-shaped.) My father had been a Communist during the 1930s – though he never talked about it, I assume he parted company with the party over the Hitler-Stalin Pact, as so many other USian Marxians did – but his commitment to the ideology and his love of Russian music remained unchanged.

There was eeriness here too: somehow, though the only words of English on the Red Army Chorus album said “Stimson Trading Company, New York, N.Y.,” my toddler self correctly understood the songs, not as words but as mental pictures – a perplexing truth I discovered in 1979 after I bought a modern, 33.3 rpm version of the album that included a booklet translating the songs and explaining their historical backgrounds.

As I have said before, though my father was a terrible parent – so emotionally remote one of his daughters actively despises him even now, 46 years after his sudden death from a simultaneous stroke and heart attack – he was the best, most knowledgeable, most thought-provoking teacher I have ever known, particularly in the fields of history and politics. As alienated as I was by his parenting, I could not but love him for his eloquence, his intellectual prowess and his socioeconomic and political bravery. Our relationship flourished after my arrest in 1963, and I will forever miss the long, face-to-face conversations with him that characterized my summer as a civil rights activist (1963) and my final years as a working journalist in East Tennessee, 1963-1964, before I returned to New York City the first week of 1965. Interacting more as two adult comrades than as father and son, we chatted comfortably and thoughtfully, often over dinners at Knoxville's now-deservedly legendary S&W Cafeteria, which was just around the corner from his office as owner and general manager of Park Mortgage Company. In those days he was the only mortgage banker in the state of Tennessee (and probably in the entire South) with balls enough to lend money to credit-worthy African-American families for purchasing houses in hitherto all-white neighborhoods.

07/09/2017

REVOLUTION OF 1776 SPAWNED BY SLAVE-OWNERS' FEARS OF ABOLITION: New scholarship confirms beyond argument something my Marxian father taught me 67 years ago – that the hidden motivebehind the so-called “American revolution” was the preservation of slavery. In other words, what the “patriots” intended was nothing more than the 18th Century equivalent of a Nazi coup – an intent repeatedly underscored by its subsequent history, for which see also here,here, here, and here. (Disclosure: my paternal ancestors include Margaret Blisse and Mary Blisse, mother and daughter who were independent women farmers in Connecticut during the mid 1640s and were imprisoned on charges of witchcraft but somehow managed to beat the rap. By the time of the revolution, the family had moved to Boston, where they were lawyers and merchants, one a graduate of Harvard, another of Yale. All were Loyalists; thus their lands were confiscated, and they were driven – at bayonet-point and with only such possessions as they could carry on their backs – into permanent exile. The men then served as officers in the British Army, while their wives and children fled to Canada. My immediate paternal ancestors did not return to the United States until the early 1900s.)

CAPITALIST GOVERNANCE AS GENOCIDE (I): The real significance of Trumpcare is it formalizes the final destruction of the social contract, thereby completing the descent into officially sanctioned Ayn Rand moral imbecility the Capitalists have sought long before the matriarch of monetary murderousness exhaled her first malignant breath.

CAPITALIST GOVERNANCE AS GENOCIDE (II): A true-to-life portrait of plutocracy shows us Trump is the Capitalist rule rather than the exception and likewise proves both his morally imbecilic twinship with the Clintons and the ideological twinhood of the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties.

CAPITALIST GOVERNANCE AS GENOCIDE (III): The defining clash of our time is the fight between the plutocrats who believe healthcare should forever remain a privilege of wealth versus those of us who believe healthcare is a human right that should be available to all regardless of religion, race, gender, socioeconomic status or sexuality. That's why – at least for the foreseeable future – single-payer healthcare is doomed. We won't get it – we can't possibly get it – until we first get rid of Capitalism. Meanwhile the Trump/Pence Regime, obviously in furtherance of its privilege-of-wealth agenda, has blocked release of promised Medicare data, the real story of which is told in the comment thread.

EL SALVADOR SENTENCES RAPE VICTIM TO 30 YEARS IN PRISON: In a terrifying preview of the anti-abortion policy sought by the Trump/Pence Regime on behalf its JesuNazi constituents, an El Salvador court has condemned a 19-year-old rape victim to the living death of 30 years in one of that nation's unspeakably inhumane prisons merely because the resultant pregnancy ended in stillbirth. She was convicted of aggravated homicide under a zero-tolerance law the JesuNazi theocrats cheer and applaud as “a miracle.”

PATRIARCHAL MALEVOLENCE ALSO CLAIMS A VICTIM IN NEPAL: Illegally banished to isolation in a menstruation hut, a Nepal teen died after she was twice bitten by a venomous snake and her parents refused to get her medical treatment. (Similarity between “malevolence” and “male violence” duly noted.)

ON MATTERS OF EMPIRE, TOO MANY AFRO-AMERICAN POLITICIANS MIMIC OBAMA: Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford reports on another of the bitter truths of USian politics – that “more than half of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to continue the bombing of Libya” and “the closer one gets to the Democratic Party, the less peace-oriented Black organizations become.” Meanwhile Ford's colleague Margaret Kimberley notes that Trump's behavior differs from that of his predecessors only to the extent the predecessors' behavior was covered up.

VIRGINIA COPS OPENLY SIDE WITH JESUNAZIS IN CRUSHING PROTESTS: A scoop-the-world report on (more) atrocities perpetrated by fascist goons and facilitated by Mainstream Media censorship.

US CAPITALISTS CHECKMATED BY THEIR OWN GREED: The Russia-China alliance formed in response to USian economically motivated military aggression will prove disastrous to the Empire's scheme for global conquest. The big question is whether the enraged Capitalists will then start World War III in an ultimately selfish, better-death-than-defeat spasm of apocalyptic moral imbecility.

Now For the Good News...

OREGON MOVES TO PROTECT WOMEN FROM THE PUSSY-GRABBER-IN-THIEF and his JesuNazi Vice President by enacting a new state law that not only protects abortion rights but universal access to all forms of reproductive care.

WASHINGTON FINALLY FUNDS WHAT IS CALLED THE NATION'S BEST PARENTAL LEAVE LAW. Enacted a decade ago, the measure was denied funding until Gov. Jay Insley signed the biennial budget thrashed out behind closed doors in a bitterly contested last-minute compromise measure many of the contents of which remain undisclosed.

And Some Good Listening Too...

'O MAIDENS FAIR RAISE YOUR EYES, MAIDENS WIPE AWAY THE TEARDROPS': The inimitable Paul Robeson sings “The Song of the Plains,” Полюшко-поле (Polyushka Polye), a traditional song of the Red Cavalry. Sung in English and Russian, its changes in rhythm correctly reflect the horse-cavalry routine, common to every army in the world, of an hour afoot (to rest the horses) for every hour in the saddle. Though Robeson's singing of it has long been suppressed in the USian Imperial Homeland, this song became the unofficial anthem of the U.S. Communist Party during the New Deal and World War II eras. Give it a listen, along with these other now-forgotten Robeson classics of revolutionary consciousness here, here and here. And why should “maidens wipe away the teardrops”? Because the Soviet Union was the first country in the modern world to officially acknowledge female equality in every realm.

07/06/2017

DESPITE DELAYS, TRUMPCARE WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BECOME LAW, with its tyrannies compelled and excused by white USians' religiously fostered genocidal hatreds of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asiatics, First Nations peoples, LGBTQ folks and anti-patriarchal women of all races. Meanwhilethe total corruption of the Democratic (sic) Party ensures the USian policy of healthcare as a privilege of wealth will endure as long as the Empire itself endures. Thus USian single-payer universal healthcare is effectively doomed for all eternity, never mind the magnitude of the public's desperate yearning for such healthcare-as-a-human-right protection is again confirmed, this time accidentally by a Republican survey.

FORMER REAGAN OFFICIAL NOW CALLS FOR (SOCIALIST) REVOLUTION: the headline on Paul Craig Roberts' newest essay tells most of the story, “Once Only Blacks Were Enslaved, Now We All Are,” and his concluding quote tells the rest of it: “Chris Hedges says that your only alternatives are to overthrow the criminal class in Washington or to accept your slavery.” Roberts' publisher Global Researchalso offers five other provocative essays on the always-relevant topic of USian imperialist savagery.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA ACTS TO SUPPRESS REVOLUTIONARY ANGER: As I have noted way too many times to count, so-called “Mainstream Media” is owned by members of the same class of plutocratic tyrants – i.e., the One Percenters – who own or control USian government at all levels whether federal, state or local. This means Mainstream Media is the privately owned, for-profit clone of Josef Goebbels' deservedly infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. And now, just as if Goebbels had risen from the grave to command his USian Capitalist legacy, Mainstream Media is (predictably) upping the volume and intensity of its ChristoFascist effluent both nationally and locally.

FEDERAL MILITARIZATION OF COPS LEADS TO BIGGER BODY COUNT: The propensity of federally militarized police for domestic atrocities – entirely predictable given the long and bloody history of war crimes tacitly encouraged by the USian military – is now confirmed even by Mainstream Media in a surprise truth-telling that will most likely cost its researchers, reporters and editors their jobs, or at the very least earn them severe reprimands from the chief censor aka publisher.

YES, VIRGINIA, HIGH TECH IS SYNONYMOUS WITH MAXIMUM SEXISM. As consumers we have all been enraged by the contemptuous, unforgivably obnoxious arrogance of too many male Nurds, who seem to take an obviously special delight in sadistically marginalizing those of us who are female. But that's only a hint of the misogynistic viciousness that obtains inside the high tech firms, where locker-room-minded patriarchs rule an innately fascist realm in which – despite allegedly zero-tolerance anti-sexual-harasment policies – males defiantly remain the strutting übermenschen who damn all females as üntermenschen. Hence new outrages continue to surface with infuriating regularity. (Note: each of the few female Nurds with whom I have been acquainted has told essentially the same story – that her male counterparts are, with few exceptions, the most connivingly malevolent woman-haters she has ever encountered. Hence I must ask: could this extreme form of male supremacy be the karmic legacy of high-tech's Nazi origins?)

LEST WE FORGET: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT'S GENUINELY FOND FRIENDSHIP WITH LYUDMILA PAVLICHENKO, as described by Smithsonian's Gilbert King in a recovery of suppressed history from an infinitely more promising era. The ending of King's text, testimony to the intensity of the bond the two women shared, moved me to momentary tears.

The Christians damn sexy as evil and nastyBut Beyoncé proves it's exquisite and classyNow all JesuNazis are having a hissyOrdained by their god to be hateful and pissy.

LB/5 July 2017 (Yes, this is again late. Its posting, which always requires about two hours of odiously meticulous clerical drudgery to live-link all the URLs, was delayed by my desperate need for catch-up sleep after being forced to arise at 5:30 a.m. on the Fourth. This is because Fred Meyer's corporate refusal to separate its monthly Senior Discount Tuesday shoppers from the last-minute holiday shoppers required getting to the store at its 8 a.m. opening – that is, [hopefully] before the Independence Day celebrants stripped it of essential grocery items such as eggs, bread and lean ground beef. That night I was too wired to get more than three hours of bad-dream sleep, which meant all day Wednesday I was nodding off at my keyboard until finally I said fuck it, went to bed and slept nearly 14 hours. Now here I am again, a still-tired age 77 but nevertheless back in action...)

END OF CHURCH/STATE SEPARATION ALREADY SPARKING THEOCRATIC ACTION: The Roberts Court – aka the Robber Court or SCROTUS (Supreme Capitalist Regulators of the United States [the judges who have us all by the crotch]) – has already ordered the supreme courts of Colorado and New Mexico to reconsider decisions prohibiting taxation in support of religious schools. (Not to brag, but this is precisely the sort of outrage I predicted.)

DENVER COPS BUST ANTI-TRUMPCARE DISABILITY ACTIVISTS: The Hill reports 10 protesters were arrestedafter they staged a two-day sit-in at Republican Senator Cory Gardner's office. (The connection between Christian theocracy and the murdrous USian insistence healthcare is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – an ugly truth routinely suppressed by mainstream media – is explained here by intelligently secular reportage and confirmed here by the theocrats themselves.)

TEXAS SUPREME COURT UNANIMOUSLY SUPPORTS CHRISTIAN ANTI-LGBTQ SUIT: These so-called “justices” essentially argue homophobic bigotry is a right of statehood (yes, just as slavery was a right of antebellum statehood). Black-robed tyrants all, they claim, “despite the (U.S.) Supreme Court’s decision that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry...a state may be permitted to give same-sex couples a piece of paper declaring them married while denying them the actual legal benefits of marriage.”

COWARDLY COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS JOIN FASCISTS IN ATTACKING PROFESSOR. The headline tells the story of what was done to Dr. Johnny Eric Williams, a tenured African-American who taught at Connecticut's predominantly white Trinity College, which further ensures its Ruling Class exclusivity by charging $69,000 per year in undergraduate tuition and fees. As noted, Williams' victimization is but another of the ever-more-commonplace incidents of censorship imposed by ChristoFascist and/or JesuNazi threats.

APROPOS SUCH THREATS, PORTLAND GOPORKERS VOTE TO MUSTER STORM TROOPERS. These Oregon Republicans (aka ChristoFascists and JesuNazis) have voted to use armed thugs from Oath Keepers, Oregon Three Percenters and kindred militias to protect pro-Trump, pro-theocracy rallies by Patriots Prayer (sic) and other such organizations.

MEANWHILE, TRUMP REFOCUSES A FEDERAL ANTI-EXTREMISM PROGRAM from white supremacists to Muslims, a predictable expression of the regime's unprecedented fosterage of racism and bigotry.

KOCK BROTHERS STICK IT TO THEIR REPUBLICAN BENEFICIARIES, threatening to withhold promised fundingunless the harshest possible formulation of the Trump/Pence DEATH Act becomes law, thus Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare.

NO ANTI-CAPITALIST MASS MOVEMENT MEANS NO HUMAN FUTURE, so Paul Street argues in a provocative essay here that also damns the Democratic (sic) Party for “inauthentic opposition” that deftly perpetuates Capitalism's ecocideal tyranny.

RELEVANT RANTS (1): The managing editor of Salon argues the religious war incipient in the clash between coastal secularists and inland theocrats will ruin us all. I respond such a war may be the only way to save ourselves, our species and our planet from JesuNazi Capitalism's policies of genocide and ecocide:

Good reporting, Ms. Keane, save for one point. If indeed the JesuNazi states of the former Confederacy and their ideologcally adjunct realms in the Lower Middle West were to secede, we the (real) people – that is, we true humans who are not the hateful Christian theocrats that in service to their sadistic god would again burn dissenters at the stake and stone to death LGBTQ people and women who dare be sexual – we would all be infinitely better off than we are now. (Anyone who ignorantly supposes these references to public burnings and stonings are hyperbole need only Google Biblical Law, perhaps also Dominionist Christianity and/or Christian Identity.)

Trouble is, the unacknowledged horror of present-day USian reality is the unreconstructed spawn of the Confederates and their neo-Copperhead allies now own and control the federal government, which means we the (fully human) people of both coasts are the ones who – this time – will have to enact and defend the ordinances of secession. The military success of which – particularly given our recognition of the need for reconciliation with Nature versus the Biblical Capitalists' bottomless hatred of Nature (whether as environmental reality or the ultimate metaphor for femaleness) – will unquestionably determine the fate of our species and the planet on which we are dependent.

I have no doubt the war implicit in these facts will happen, just as I have no doubt it will leave the country in ruins. But, alas, victory in such a conflict is the only way we will ever rid ourselves of the violently theocratic cancer that has metastasized from the South and now threatens the entire nation – though given I am 77 years old and terminally ill, I rather doubt I'll live to see it. Nevertheless – because I know the JesuNazis to be creatures with whom negotiation is impossible and from whom compromise is unobtainable – it is most assuredly tragic the U.S. Army did not suppress the Confederacy with the same genocidal severity it suppressed the First Nations. Had it done so, the U.S. might indeed be the apex of social democracy rather than the nadir of ecocidal tyranny it has become.

Relevant, informative reporting as always from Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, with but one vital omission: the ever-more-apparent likelihood the Trump/Pence victory and its final thrust to inescapable JesuNazi theocracy was planned long ago – perhaps as early as the post-Bankers'-Plot 1930s (for which see the history of Biblical Capitalism).

From this perspective, the Hillaryite-Trumpoid conflict and all the associated hurly-burly including the apparent Deep State coup-effort is nothing more than a distraction. If the Deep State truly wanted Trump gone, he would already be history. Not only could the Deep State remove him as easily as it removed President Kennedy and his brother Robert; there is also the fact that behind the smokescreens of controversy, Trump is giving our Capitalist overlords everything they want, including unlimited theocratic tyranny to ensure -- just as it did from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 until the American and French revolutions in 1776 and 1789 respectively – a disempowerment of the masses so total they will never be able to successfully overthrow their oppressors. (Though there were many peasant rebellions during those 1300 years of bottomless Christian darkness, the uprisings all failed, suppressed with maximum viciousness, the leaders unfortunate enough to survive combat hideously tortured to death in public.)

As the innate brutality of Capitalism inevitably metamorphoses into the sadistic viciousness of white-supremacist fascism, the sort of total, zero-tolerance control implicit in Abrahamic theocracy is the only way the Capitalist Ruling Class can ensure its continued reign of (necessarily) ever-intensifying savagery. The so-called Deep State, armed with its weapons of total surveillance and re-purposed as a New Inquisition, would in fact be theocracy's greatest bureaucratic beneficiary. Indeed, that Trump is the intentional fulfillment of a long, detailed and infinitely deceptive scheme for domestic regime change is the only hypothesis that, per Occam's Razor, explains all the variables – especially how Obama's executive orders gave Trump the powers he is now employing to nullify the very few remnants of USian democratic process and, as never before, to elevate the fanatical Christian theocrats to hitherto unimaginable heights of dominance..

Resist we must – for the survival of our species and indeed our entire planet is at stake in this struggle. But if we are to resist successfully, we must first know our enemy.

06/30/2017

THIS POST IS TARDY FOR TWO REASONS. One, on Tuesday I joyfully seized a depressingly rare opportunity for an afternoon of outdoor recreation which so painfully inflamed my arthritis I spent most of Wednesday in bed (though if I have another such opportunity, I will seize it with equal joyfulness, the afflictions of old age be damned). Two, looking at the defining characteristics of USian (i.e. Biblical Capitalist, i.e. JesuNazi, i.e. murderously white Christian) governance, I was paralyzed with several hours of indecision. I couldn't decide which is worse: the ever more brazen imposition of theocracy; the ever increasing (and ever more obviously genocidal) murders of minority people, especially African-Americans, by federally militarized police; or the newest disclosure of Obama's fuck-us-all vindictiveness, in this instance his malicious evasion of the Constitution to impose total-surveillance precisely as conceived by Adolph Hitler and his henchmen and now applauded by the white Christian theocrats as a means of enforcing their unspeakable malevolence. But since it's this “secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power” that knowingly enables these and all other USian atrocities, that's where we'll start today's Dispatches.

SCOTUS OPENS DOOR FOR FORCIBLE TAXATION TO FUND THEOCRACY. The Capitalist-mandated imposition of USian theocracy went public in 1954 with the still-controversial and often vindictively enforced addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance – the capital “G” making it undeniably obvious the deity so referenced is the Divine Sadist worshiped by white-supremacist Christians. And now the theocracy campaign has been handed its greatest and most decisive leap forward by the USian Supreme Court in a pivotal 7-2 decision that potentially makes every USian taxpayer a slave of national Christendom. Or as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the court has ruled, “for the first time...the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.” In other words, the Roberts Court has reduced the Establishment Clause to another of the innumerable Big Lies implicit in the biggest Big Lie of all time, “our democracy.” Meanwhile, JesuNazi Justice Neil Gorsuch took advantage of another Supreme Court decision to declare total and unending war on LGBTQ people.

THEOCRACY IS LIKE A VENOMOUS SERPENT: WE IGNORE IT AT OUR OWN PERIL Most USians – 63 percent – are already at theocracy's gateway-belief in the Bible as the literally true (and therefore indisputable) word of their infamously sadistic god. They thus countenance – whether by their support or unconcern – the ever-escalating imposition of Christian tyranny. Yet too many of us who oppose it are effectively self-silenced, whether by the smug and arrogant belief religion has become irrelevant or by misguided “political correctness” that demands tolerance of anything labeled “religion” – including the JesuNazism of the theocrats. Moreover, all these theocratically contributory viewpoints are fostered and sustained by the extent to which mainstream media methodically downplays and often censors the terrifying facts about the murderous intentions of the Christian fanatics. (Mainstream media, let us not forget, is owned by some of the same One Percenters who not only own or control USian government at all levels but whose fathers and grandfathers were the theocrats' primary financiers.) Now, with the advent of the Trump/Pence regime, these Capitalist-financed theocrats control all three branches – legislative, executive, judicial – of the federal government, which has thus become history's most vindictively powerful pusher of this particularly paralytic opiate of the masses.

TOTAL SURVIELLANCE – OBAMA'S FULFILLMENT OF A NAZI DREAM – IS NOW OUR TOTAL REALITY. Thanks to a hitherto-unreported Obama Regime atrocity – just one of the many atrocities facilitated by our moronic acceptance of Obama the Orator as the messiah of “change we can believe in” and our subsequent victimization by his (utterly predictable) shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – every one of “those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have...are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.” Perfected in the post-Syriza rat-lab the global Capitalists have made of Greece, such a world was originally proposed by Reinhard Heydrich, who intended to bring every individual within the Third Reich under “continuous supervision.” Nor does USian total surveillance stop with electronic spying. Soon even the books, magazines and other reading material carried by USian air passengers will be subject to physical scrutiny – and therefore to ideological evaluation – by the Transportation Security Administration's goons, an obvious Trump Regime precursor to the sorts of hands-on intrusiveness mandated by JesuNazi theocracy. Again we see the ideological and historical connectionsbetween Capitalism, the USian government and its German Nazi prototype. Which, by the way, included a special branch of the Gestapo, the Reich Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, dedicated to the suppression of LGBTQ people and the female sexuality that had flourished during the Weimar Republic's doomed experiment in social democracy.

MORE EXAMPLES OF OUR FORCIBLE CONVERSION FROM CITIZENS TO SERFS AND SLAVES: Firstly, there's the “vast net of stress, fear and insecurity” inflicted on an entire generation by student loan debt which – exactly as intended – is suppressing resistance to USian socioeconomic savagery. Then there's the unprecedented effort to criminalize dissent, especially when the dissent seeks to block fossil-fuel pipelines. Note that even the most egregious of these laws are sure to be upheld by the Roberts Court. Lastly there's New Jersey's mandate to teach k-12 students how to display proper submissiveness and thereby – for sure if you're white, and at least theoretically if you're African-American, Hispanic or First Nations – avoid being murdered or brutalized by the police.

DON'T IMAGINE EVEN FOR A MINUTE TRUMPCARE IS DEAD. While the Democratic (sic) Party's PseudoLeftists foolishly celebrate the delay in the imposition of Trumpcare, those of us who are more politically honest realize our reprieve is only temporary. That's why disabled activists say they'll continue risking arrest – and Trump Regime encouraged brutalization by Washington D.C. cops– to protest the genocidal contents of what should be called the DEATH Act – Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare – another key element in the Christian Theocrat agenda (see “murderous intentions of Christian fanatics,” above).

WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON A FRENCH AGENT? Historian Paul LeBlanc rebuts the revisionist notion Lenin was a German agent by noting the exact parallels between Lenin's relationship with Imperial Germany and Washington's relationship with Royalist France.

CONTRARY TO THE BIG LIES TAUGHT AS HISTORY, USIAN CLASS REBELLION WAS COMMONPLACE. That's why the Ruling Class – the true founders of the Deep State – decided they needed a constitution to protect their greed-begotten gold from “Levelers,” the Communists of the late 18th Century.

DOOR-TO-DOOR ENCYCLOPEDIA SALES AS THE CURE FOR POVERTY: A cautionary introduction to the newest Capitalist propaganda, a 21st Century version of the (alleged) “power of positive thinking.”

BOOKS: AN ESOTERIC ESSAY ON WHY JAMES BALDWIN IS AGAIN RELEVANT.An excerpt from William J. Maxwell's James Baldwin: the FBI Files (Arcade Publishing: 2017).

YET ANOTHER OBITUARY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC (SIC) PARTY: “It’s not that the Democratic Party can’t 'wake up' to Americans’ surging support for a bold challenge to the corporate stranglehold over our economy and politics. It’s that it won’t.” Italics as in original, which underscores our desperate need for a new political party.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Anyone who questions the 21st Century relevance of Marxism should be reminded that it's the only proven antidote for Capitalism, especially Capitalism metamorphosed into fascism, witness how the triumph of the Red Army saved us from a world ruled by Hitler and his Wall Street financiers.

THE OBVIOUS LESSON TAUGHT BY SINGLE-PAYER'S DEFEAT – the lesson emphatically denied and relentlessly suppressed by those who in their secret, pro-Capitalist terror of an activist public peddle hope as “the dope-iate of the masses”) – has two parts. One is the irremediable perversion of the entire USian political system, such that all its so-called “representative” bodies – city councils, county councils, state assemblies and legislatures and of course Congress itself – now function only as weapons of oppression, imposing the ever-more-sadistic mandates of Capitalism as it metamorphoses into JesuNazism, the needs of the people be damned. Because the One Percenters now literally own USian government at every level, so-called “representative” governance is no less a Big Lie than USian “democracy.” Just as the sole purpose of the government in Vichy France was to enforce the murderous will of the Nazis, the sole purpose of USian government today is to enforce the equally murderous will of our Capitalist overlords. But that's only half the lesson we should learn from the death of single-payer. The second part, implicit in the zero-tolerance despotism revealed by the first part, is that all reform efforts are doomed. Like trying to detoxify a Portuguese Man-O'-War, reform – dependent as it was on the now-forever-abolished fosterage provided by democratic process – is nothing more than a waste of time and energy. In other words, single-payer healthcare – or any other definitively humanitarian proposal anywhere in the the ever-more-brazenly white-supremacist JesuNazi United States – is undoubtedly dead until the Empire itself dies of its own malignancy, whether by thermonuclear apocalypse or environmental cataclysm.

(ASTUTE READERS WILL NOTE THE ABOVE TEXTS REGARD the House and Senate versions of Trumpcare as coequals in murderousness destined to be combined and thus become law. That is because the Democratic (sic) Party's history of betrayals tells us the Senate Democrats, who exactly like the Republicans are profitably obedient to their Capitalist masters, will not use the procedural power by which they might stop the DEATH Act – Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare – from enactment. And the Death Act it truly is, precisely as we are doomed to learn when it is imposed on us by the JesuNazi-weaponized mechanism of moral imbecility we know as the U.S. Government.)

JESUNAZIS RUNNING AMOK EVERYWHERE ELSE IN USIA TOO. Missouri's JesuNazis have passed a viciously misogynistic expression of Christian Love that – if you're an unmarried woman – encourages your boss to fire you for using birth control and urges your landlord to evict you for the same reason. The measure, which also targets women who have had abortions or who become pregnant out of wedlock, is certain to be signed into law. Meanwhile Vice President Mike Pence, the zero-tolerance theocrat who would replace Trump were the president to be impeached, bared his JesuNazi fangs during Focus on the Family's 40th anniversary celebration, though mainstream media is now so intimidated by Christian hatefulness, the only genuinely complete report on this gathering of fanatics was by a college newspaper. Obviously the war against women's sexual freedom – a war in which the closet male-supremacist Democrats (including Hillary) are as complicit as the openly woman-hating Republicans – continuesad nauseam, and just as obviously, the theocrats are winning.

GESTAPO-MINDED MILWAUKEE SHERIFF TURNS DOWN DHS APPOINTMENT. For reasons that are obviously closely guarded secrets, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, the JesuNazi African-American tagged by Trump to be the Department of Homeland Security's reichsführer for the federalization and militarization of local police, has turned down the appointment. Several journalists and critics, myself among them, feared Clarke would use his position to organize local police departments, which thanks to federal militarization are are already equipped like armored infantry units, into an USian Gestapo, perhaps even into a Waffen SS clone to violently resist any attempt to remove Trump from office. (Aside to readers: needless to say, this is one time I'm damn well glad my prediction was wrong.)

USIAN SECRET POLICE IN THEOCRATIC ACTION. This report on the Briana Waters case shows the breathtaking lengths to which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the federal government in general will go in its campaigns against those who dare defy the hatred of Mother Nature decreed by nationhood “under God.” The same strategy and tactics will of course be employed against anyone who dares defy any other aspect of the Biblical Capitalist USian Empire's ever-more-intolerant patriarchal order.

“MANUFACTURED ILLITERACY AND MISEDUCATION” SPAWNED MORON NATION: a courageously outspoken and therefore compelling essay by the devastatingly perceptive Henry Giroux explains why Trump won – and, by implication, why the JesuNazis are conquering the USian Homeland and why Margaret Atwood's most horrific prophecies are coming true, thereby refuting the foolish optimism – no doubt mandated by marketing considerations – on which The Handmaid's Tale ends. (Disclosure: in my view, Giroux is the best informed and most boldly truthful education critic – and therefore by far the most important such writer – of our hopelessly dystopian age.)

THE INFURIATING BIG LIE OF THOSE REFERENCES TO “OUR DEMOCRACY,” a rant I wrote and posted elsewhere, as – typically in moments of extreme vexation – I sometimes do:

Anytime an USian political writer or commentator mentions “our democracy,” whether the source is of the PseudoLeft or the real-as-cancer Right, they identify themselves as a pro-Capitalist, Big Lie propagandist. The truth is we have had no “democracy” since 22 November 1963, though the irremediably tyrannical aftermath of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's murder has been imposed slowly, in accordance with the boiled-frog strategy of conquest and oppression. And now that the Moron Nation frogs are at long last awakening to the fact their proverbial water is indeed aboil, it is entirely too late. “Our democracy” is dead. Unlike the genocidally racist Confederacy (which has not only risen again but has already triumphed), or the sadistic god so beloved of the JesuNazis, USian “democracy” – even as limited as it was – can never be resurrected. That's because its death is the consequence of Capitalism's historically inevitable metamorphosis into fascism, which is as much a force of nature as seasonal change. Consequently we are now ruled by one fascist (i.e., corporatist) party that conceals its dictatorial solidarity behind the deceptiveness of two names, a duopoly of disinformation in which the Democratic (sic) Party is no less corrupt (and no less despotic) than its Republican counterpart. Thus for a writer or commentator to reference “our democracy” is – in the ultimate and most absolute sense – to brazenly lie, thereby reinforcing the total absence of democracy that characterizes the USian present and will remain its defining characteristic until this our species' most evil empire either destroys the planet in a thermonuclear apocalypse or collapses due to the environmental ruination mandated by its own theocratic hatred of Nature.

ICONOCLASM FOR THE DAY: The Trump Regime wants to halt undocumented immigration? It should merely acknowledge, publicly and in all relevant languages, the hideously hopeless truth of the USian homeland's socioeconomic reality: that we its workers are no better than serfs or slaves, a condition from which escape is impossible, and that our children will thus suffer inescapable poverty and exploitation even more calculatedly vicious than that which is inflicted on ourselves. Then post appropriate signage along the borders: “ Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.”

WHAT THEN MIGHT WE DO? Given the looming threats of our species' self-obliteration, whether by thermonuclear apocalypse, environmental cataclysm or some combination of both, as Capitalism is already inflicting on us all via Fukushima, continued belief in “the myth of human progress” is not only absurd but unforgivably foolhardy defiance of the recognition of historical and scientific reality demanded by dialectical materialism. Contrary to the belief of the martyred Martin Luther King Jr., the “moral arc of the universe” does not bend toward justice. In hideous truth, it bends in exactly the opposite direction, toward manifest injustice. But precisely as dialectical materialism tells us – as indeed I have said more times than I can count – we cannot cope with such nominally unspeakable reality until we acknowledge the fulsomeness of its toxicity and thus enable ourselves to accurately name it. True, when we do so, it seems we are doomed, in which context the oppressively paralytic imbecility of hope – and more to the point, how those shackles of hope serve our overlords – becomes undeniable. Nevertheless, we cannot know the future; it is precisely because amidst its unknowns there is a (very faint) possibility our species might survive the present age of unmitigated horror that we should prepare ourselves accordingly. And a cogent starting-point for that preparation is Lenin's essay on Dual Power, which is perhaps even more relevant to us today than it was to Russians a century ago in 1917.

06/22/2017

Genocidal Murder – Whether by Police and Soldiers Who Gun Us Down or by Politicians and Bureaucrats Who Maliciously Deny Us Medical Care and Other Life-Sustaining Stipends and Services – Is Now This Nation's Sole (and Soul) Defining Norm

I was seeking a vivid metaphor to illustrate the manifest horror the U.S. has become – the product of Capitalism's inevitable and (since 22 November 1963), unrestrained and oft-accelerated metamorphosis into fascism. But I had nearly abandoned my quest when someone (most likely the Muse, as it was the Solstice, and the turns of the year are among the times she is most powerfully compelling), whispered in my mind's ear I should consider the deadly Portuguese Man-O'-War, the biological horror that, as the planet warms, increasingly infests the global oceans. I knew of the Man-O'-War from the portion of my childhood I spent in Florida; another child, a girl, a second-grader as I myself was then, dove off a boat-dock into a Man-O'-War's tentacles and died shrieking in unspeakable agony soon afterward. I had always thought of the creature that killed her as an especially venomous subspecies of jellyfish, but in the Muse-suggested reading linked immediately above, I learned the Man-O'-War is not a single organism but a group of microscopic creatures so ingrown “they are unable to survive independently, and therefore have to work together.” It thus operates exactly as the Capitalists and their politicians, judges and functionaries (including soldiers and cops) operate – as separate but vital parts of an infinitely merciless predatory being.

From this multiple-creatures-as-a-single-being perspective – thank you, O Muse – our present nadir of political hurly-burly is the consequence of a glaringly apparent sickness in one of these creatures, say an intestinal equivalent turned so explosively incontinent it is splattering us all with ruinously infective feces. But this is not to absolve the being's other parts. Just as the four parts of the Man-O'-War are co-equals in its toxicity, so are the four parts of the USian mechanism of Capitalist governance equally guilty in its own murderousness. The judge who acquits the cops who murders targeted minorities is as guilty of murder as the (white) Capitalists who own the politicians who write the law and appoint the judges who use the law as written to protect the cops and soldiers who do the actual killing. In other words, USian governance, like the Man-O'-War, is merely being itself – though the former is not only conscious of its deadliness but sadistically exalts in it, with the comment-thread of this report on the murder of Charleena Lyles evidencing the same bottomlessly malevolent glee as the video vignette of Hillary Clinton cackling at Gaddafi's hideous death by anal impalement. At least by the time the follow-up story was published, the racists had seemingly departed, perhaps to another Ku Klux Klan meeting or JesuNazi revival.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA IGNORES HEALTH CARE DEFORM, BUT NONE DARE SAY WHY. All the broadly published complainants who justifiably denounce how mainstream media is suppressing the nauseating story of the Trumpcare atrocity nevertheless continue to robotically parrot the ever-more-obvious Big Lie of “our democracy.” Though they accurately report one of the many ugly truths that prove our alleged “democracy” is as dead as the murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose assassination undoubtedly signaled the USian pseudo-democracy's death, even the most avowedly Leftist of these many voluble critics cannot bear to admit what it means that mainstream media is owned by the same morally imbecilic plutocrats who own and control all USian government whether federal, state or local. Hence here are the forbidden facts explain mainstream media's deliberately deadly silence. Firstly, mainstream media has become the privately owned, for-profit equivalent of Josef Goebbels' infamous Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; secondly, the mainstream media's refusal to expose the contents of what should properly be called the DEATH Act – Depriving Every American of Tenable Healthcare – proves why this mechanism of slow-motion genocide will soon become law. And why is that? Quite simply because it gives our Capitalist overlords – the mercilessly death-dealing, Portuguese-Man-o'-War-like despots who own the politicians and the media that covers the politicians' manifest malevolence – precisely what they want: our inescapable extermination, not only without the ignominy of death camps, but in a manner that allows these murders to be blamed not on the murderers but on those of us who are their victims.

JESUNAZI WAR AGAINST FEMALE SEXUALITY ESPECIALLY VICIOUS TO FOSTER TEENS, a disclosure of specifically focused USian bigotry that is no surprise to me given my encounter with its peripheral antagonisms as an unwanted child of divorced parents in the incipiently ChristoFascist South of the 1940s and 1950s. A judge blocked my father's attempt to abandon me in a state orphanage a few weeks after my officially insane mother tried to murder us both – until then the two of us were father-and-son close, but ever afterward he obviously feared I bore what he believed was my mother's genetic taint. One of the more embittering lessons of that era was how all but one of my public-school teachers, even in high school, singled me out for zero-tolerance disciplinary scrutiny as soon as my scholastic records revealed my familial circumstances. (I say “public school” because apart from my high-school senior English, speech and drama teacher, a dear dear woman from New York named Dorothy Merritt who is one of my childhood's three female saviors, the only exceptions to this rule of hatefulness were the nuns of my four years in a parochial school, strict though emotionally supportive, Sisters of Mercy who most assuredly lived up to their name.) In any case, based on my experiences, I can only imagine the schoolhouse horrors to which foster children are subjected, all the more so – given USia's run-amok misogyny – to those who are female.

“Capitalist logic does not allow for surplus populations to be sustained for long. They (which should be read “we”) either have to be reabsorbed into the value producing mechanisms of the system, or disposed of.“

Bottom line, we white members of the 99 percent goddamn well better learn to listen to our African-American sisters and brothers, because what has been the deadly norm for them since before the dawn of the Empire – and for every other designated minority since then – will soon be the norm for all the rest of us as well.

*****

SOLSTICE REFLECTIONS: HOW THE CHRISTIANS FUCKED UP THE CALENDAR TO ORPHAN US FROM MOTHER EARTH. If you pay any attention to what happens in the botanical, astronomical and meteorological realms – and if you have any notion of being a real dialectical materialist, you most assuredly should observe all environmental phenomena – you're probably aware that for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere (and especially for those of us who live north of about 40 degrees North Latitude or in mountainous regions down to about 37 N), the present-day official seasons are as nonsensical as the claim we USians live in a democracy. For example, Summer, which our calendars tell us started only yesterday, has in fact been with us since the beginning of May, just as Autumn, which our calendars inform us starts on 23 September, is typically first evident in August. Likewise the differences between calendar winter, which starts on the 21 December, versus real Winter, which starts around Hallowe'en, and calendar spring, beginning 20 March, versus genuine Spring, which starts closer to 1 February.

I became vaguely aware of these vexatious differences as a child, when I planted my first flowers and vegetables, but I did not understand the misogyny and ecophobia that lurks beneath our modern-day seasonal boundaries until I read The White Goddess, Robert Graves' aptly subtitled Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (International Authors:1948; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York: 1966.) Graves makes it clear our relentlessly phenomenological pre-Christian kindred formulated a calendar on the basis of untold millennia of observation that not only depicted all the stages of the environmental year but was, as well, the basis of what in all probability was our European subspecies' original alphabet, the origins of which Alexander Marshack has traced at least as far back as 30,000 BCE, for which see his epic work The Roots of Civilization (Moyer Bell Ltd., London: 1991).

Based on these references and subsequent scholarly reconstructions by modern Goddess-centered Pagans, the old calendar and its resurrected variants begin spring on Imbolg (1 or 2 February). This makes the Vernal Equinox or Ostara a mid-Spring festival thus conceptually akin to mid-Summer, mid-Autumn and mid-Winter. These old/new calendars begin summer on 1 May (Beltane in Celtic realms, Walpurgisnacht in Germanic realms). They celebrate the Summer Solstice as Midsummer's Dav or Letha, when the sun god turns south and begins his annual decline. They mark the beginning of Autumn on 1 August, Lughnassadh or Bron Trograine. The Autumnal Equinox or Mabon is the mid-Autumn festival. Lastly on this calendar, Hallowe'en or Samhain is the night the year dies and its male spirit flees to the netherworld. Many people – myself among them (even as a child when I presumably knew nothing of the associated lore) – feel the sudden unmistakably saddening sense of absence that seems to define its immediate aftermath. Hence “Hallowe’en: the Morning After,” the (attempted) poem I wrote in my journal on 1 November 1979:

Jack-O-Lantern shards amidst

The red and yellow leaves

Have lent their frost-diluted colors

To the dawn as if

Perhaps in mercy and regret

They would sooth a sky

Now emptied of all birds

Save crows. The year is dead;

Its spark of life has

Vanished from the chill-damp air:

The barn is but a tomb, the field

A barren nest, the land itself

Gone hollow as an empty skull

till Spring.

Then on this calendar comes Winter Solstice – Yule – when the year is gloriously reborn from the womb of the Goddess, and from our Northern Hemisphere perspective the sun turns north again and once more begins his growth to Midsummer strength.

Why was all this lovely and poetically compelling symbolism cast away? Because from the perspective of the Abrahamic patriarchs – the misogynistic authorities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam who have conquered most of this planet – Mother Earth is the ultimate “unfit parent.” Not only do they damn her as a female (and therefore forever cursed by their sadistic god), she is also condemned as an unabashed slut, a cosmic harlot whom even the most minimal recognition will empower to reclaim her children and lead all of us, especially her daughters, back into the allegedly deadly alleged sins of sexual self-discovery.

Verily, may our memories of the brightest light nurture us through the waxing darkness until the sun turns north again.

06/18/2017

(WARNING TO AOL SUBSCRIBERS: America On Line [AOL] email is apparently blocking transmission of anything that bears my name or byline. Welcome to the post-Net-Neutrality USian JesuNazi Empire.)

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY CANDIDACY OF BERNIE SANDERS: Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford exposes the pseudo-socialist as “the hero of the phony left.” An ultimate example of speaking truth to power – and therefore a de facto obituary for the United States.

BASEBALL SHOOTING PROVOKES A SWARM OF COMMENTARIES, most of which are predictable polemics. But here, here and here are three that rise above the numbskull norm. Meanwhile, of course, the JesuNazis continue their war of intimidation against anyone who dares question their agenda of genocide and theocracy.

ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE CAPITALIST MURDER MACHINE is the USian DEATH Act – “Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare,” the real purpose of Trumpcare, which as we all know is being written in defiant, unprecedented secrecy precisely as befits the mechanism of genocide not even its harshest mainstream critics dare say it is. Meanwhile those who offer hope as the dope-iate of the masses circulate petitions in the utterly moronic belief such feeble gestures might stop the USian One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassal-whores from enacting this latest scheme to exterminate all of us deemed no longer exploitable for profit. Have no doubt: Trumpcare will become law, and millions of us – especially those of us who are elderly and/or disabled (not to mention those of us who are female or LGBTQ) – will be slain by healthcare denial malevolently designed to blame us for our own deaths.

WHY I STILL PAY MY UNION DUES: the National Writers Union – which as a consequence of the One Percent's ever-intensifying war against organized labor is a subset of the United Auto Workers – does an admirable job of going after the (many) publishers who try to fuck us writers and photographers out of our pay.

RELEVANT NOTES ON COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: Yes, Mother Jones has proven itself to be part of the pseudo-Left, and I have little doubt its long-range purpose is to co-opt and neutralize grassroots radicalism by turning it into recruitment for the Democratic (sic) Party, but this report's notes on community organizing may nevertheless be useful.

*****

A LETTER FROM A READER AND FRIEND, a woman of color, her name withheld lest her story subject her to racist death threats or worse:

“In 2009, I was an English tutor at South Seattle Community College, home to one of the most diverse student bodies in Seattle with a large population of East Asians and Somalis. However, most of the teachers and staff were white.

“I had a very difficult computer coding class and our teacher told us the library kept one copy of the book we needed that we could use for free. Otherwise, it was like $60 or something. The catch was that it had to be returned within 24 hours. So i checked out the book. The next day, I realized I didn’t have class so I emailed the library and asked if I could bring that book in the next day—when I had class again. The person wrote back and said, ‘yes.’ When I arrived on campus the following day, I stupidly went to the library first. I needed the book for class so I thought I’d ask the staff if I could return the book in an hour when class was over. Well, all hell broke loose.

“The first guy I approached, a young white guy, glared at me, stared at the book in my hand and yelled out loud, ‘that book was due yesterday! Give me that book! Give me that book!’ I had no idea who he was as I had never dealt with him before so I turned away and walked towards the desk where two white librarians (one male, one female) were sitting. I had spoken to them previously about the book. So when I saw them, I asked, ‘does this guy work here? Why is he chasing me?’ To my utter horror, they said the same exact thing, ‘that book was due yesterday! Give that book to us! Give it now or we’ll call security!’ I was dumbfounded and told them I had gotten an email saying I could turn the book in a day late. The male said, ‘we don’t know who told you that. That book was due yesterday!’ Again, he threatened to call security.

“Of course I gave them the book. When I entered my classroom, I said out loud, ‘I can’t believe they were going to call security on me for bringing a book in one day late!’ My teacher looked up from his computer and said, ‘I just got the email. You’ve been banned from the library.’ In that moment, I knew it was racial discrimination. I had faced it so many times before in Seattle.

“So I went to the human rights officer, or whatever her title was. She helped me craft what turned out to be a 4-page letter. She told me we would set up a meeting once she got a reply. Well, she got a reply all right. The guy went ballistic. He accused me of turning him into a nervous wreck by saying he racially discriminated against me, that from now on he wouldn’t be able to talk to any of the students of color because something he would say might be construed as bigotry. Seriously, he turned the whole thing around on me, blamed the victim.

“What’s more, the human rights officer advised me to drop the case because she thought it wouldn’t be worth it to try to get an apology out of him. The dean had already apologized and the so-called human rights officer thought that was as much as we would get.

“As I did more research into the guy, I realized those state jobs are pretty cushy. Imagine being a librarian at a community college. The guy doesn’t do squat all day, has a nice paycheck, bennies and a nice retirement package. That’s the problem with people in those positions. They cannot be fired.

“I also worked at Seattle Central Community College back in 1989-1990 and had similar experiences there. Those incidents, and there have been many, many, many, are what made me leave Seattle so many times. I only came back because I would miss being around my Mom. But I will never live in that hateful, racist, ‘let’s pretend we’re liberal progressives’ cowtown again!

“By the way – apropos your reporting on the theocrats – it's hard to believe people actually think ‘god’ wrote a book, published it and distributed it to hotels around the world. LOL”.

MY RESPONSE: Not at all surprised. When I was there, 1972 through 1976, Seattle was the most coldly unfriendly, viciously xenophobic, malevolently bourgeois place I've ever lived. I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, a very fine, Village-Voice-class alternative newspaper that died in 1982. Hence at the height of The Sun's too-brief existence I was kind of a local art star, but I was never forgiven – and more often than not openly despised – for the fact I am from “Jew York” (as in “why don't you go back there where you belong”). I was also damned for being outspokenly Marxian; for my Pagan belief if there is a deity, surely the proper pronoun is She; and most of all for being “too intellectual.” Later, c. 1979 when I was lovers with an African-American university professor, Seattle was one of the places she and I most assuredly did not go. (Self-consciously Working-Class Tacoma, where each of us lived, was notably less hostile toward us as a couple.) Seattle, at least as I knew it, is to “progressive” as a used toilet brush is to “unsoiled” – though I'm told it's gotten less obviously bigoted thanks to Kshama Sawant.

06/14/2017

WAPO EXPOSES AG'S TARGETING OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA USERS. The Washington Postproves beyond any doubt – because patients (and cancer patients in particular) are by far the most research-legitimized consumers of the drug – that Sessions intends a zero-tolerance crusade against all marijuana users just as I predicted last week.

MOREOVER, THE FACT MOST CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATES NOW SAY THEY FAVOR LEGALIZATION IS MEANINGLESS for at least five reasons. (Note: the following repetitions of the “last week” link are deliberate, intended to facilitate ease of access to the reports so cited.)Firstly, Christian dogma damns marijuana as the world's most powerful “gateway drug” – not because it leads to other drugs, but precisely as explained by the plethora of material to which I linked last week – because marijuana's metaphysical properties break the stranglehold of fear and intimidation by which Christianity's sadistic god controls the minds of the millions of USians raised in its malevolent theologies of eternal damnation. Which of course is the real reason Sessions and his theocratic ilk are so adamantly opposed to marijuana and so fanatically intent on eliminating all its users: they regard marijuana as the primary key for opening the psychic door that – because it is proven to intensify sensuality and thereby nullify sexual taboos – grants unlimited access to all the normal human experiences Christianity denounces as “pagan” or “Satanic” and therefore forbids as “heresy.” Secondly, thanks to Barack the Betrayer's 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act, the imperial war machine can now be used as a kick-the-door-in/murder-everybody-in-the-dwelling Gestapo whenever any federal department so chooses; as I speculated last week, one of the top-secret motives for the unprecedented increase in the war-machine budget is undoubtedly the Trump Regime's intent to use its obediently deadly military to invade legal-marijuana states and thereby suppress any and all use of the drug. Note too that massacres of marijuana users – which the empire's long record of atrocities-on-command prove the USian military will enthusiastically inflict whenever so ordered – would save the regime millions of dollars in court and confinement costs. Plus the regime could also use the de facto martial law of its war on marijuana users as an excuse for declaring full-scale national martial law and thereby facilitating the mass arrest and indefinite detention of all its opponents. Thirdly, the regime's gigantic hike in military spending is a deliberately inflicted death sentence intended to end forever the few remaining government socioeconomic assistance programs including food stamps, veterans' benefits, Medicaid and probably even Medicare. Hence the impending no-quarter war against marijuana users – precisely as I pointed out last week – serves the theocratic agenda of eliminating all public-assistance programs save the “faith-based” charities that demand you either publicly convert to Christianity or be denied food, prescription drugs, rent money and whatever other life-sustaining stipends and services the local Bible-thumpers might deign to provide. Fourthly, crushing the legal marijuana industry, which as reported last week will slash at least $1.4 billion from annual state budgets, will also – again exactly as the JesuNazis intend – nullify any ability these states might have to cope with the regime's total elimination of federal social-service funds. Fifthly, the Republican Party is proven to be the One Percent's chosen mechanism for imposing national Christian theocracy. This means the JesuNazi tyrants who control the party at all levels (and have done so, as the linked material indicates, since before the turn of the century), will soon arm-twist all the Republican politicians whether national, state or local (and many secretly JesuNazi Democrats as well, e.g. Hillary Clinton et al) into supporting the theocratic demand for maximum-sentence prosecution of marijuana users and suppliers. It is therefore literally suicidal for marijuana users and suppliers to underestimate the Trump Regime's power to impose its malevolent schemes and achieve its long-range intentions.

APROPOS THE BASEBALL SHOOTING, LET US NOT FORGET THE REICHSTAG FIRE, the caution I first voiced in the comments section of Salon's report on how the ChristoFascists aka “Republicans” immediately began using the incident to inflame the Right'salready violent hatred of the Left, whether the real (i.e., Marxian) Left or the “progressive” and Democratic (sic) Party pseudo-Left. (Because Salon is so clogged with advertising its reports take as long as 10 or even 15 minutes to download to readability, here is the full text of what I said: “Lest it be lost in all the hurly burly evoked by this shooting, let us not forget [A]-the Reichstag Fire; [B]-how it was used to nullify the notably democratic Weimar Republic Constitution; and [C] the thoroughly documented fact Hitler is boundlessly admired by Trump and his JesuNazi supporters, who since the inauguration include the heads of the USian Empire's war machine and its secret police agencies.”) Indeed, I can easily envision the Trump Regime immediately modifying the federal “instant check” system to prohibit firearms purchases by anyone associated with the Left as it is most broadly defined, to include the Pink Pistols LGBTQ self-defense organization and even all members of labor unions.

USIAN CAPITALISTS ESCALATE THEIR ALREADY-DECLARED WAR AGAINST SICK, OLD AND DISABLED PEOPLE. Obviously the insurance cartel's whores in the Trump Regime and in Congress – Democrat and Republican alike – intend by any means possible to crush the “subversive” notion healthcare is a human right and thereby preserve the uniquely USian notion healthcare is (exclusively) a privilege of wealth. Meanwhile the Senate's unprecedented secrecy– another example of the extent to which USian tyranny is now unapologetically routine – denies us advance warning of the theocratic horrors taking shape as the regime's healthcare policy even as we already see its (viciously JesuNazi) impact in the USian Homeland's rural regions. As to who is to blame, note how it was the Democratic (sic) regime of Barack the Betrayer that cleared the way for the genocidal termination of Medicaid.

FIREARMS OWNERS AND SECOND AMENDMENT SUPPORTERS BEWARE a maliciously deceptive campaign by the One Percenters' lavishly funded forcible-civillian-disarment organization that dishonestly calls itself “Everytown for Gun Safety” and works to impose mandatory pacifism and thus compulsory victimhood on the entire USian civilian population. The campaign emails' statement says, “with one click, add your name to a petition that will be delivered to federal legislators” – and in this instance it is literally true, because if you so much as open the email, your name is added to a petition to congress to enact the deceptively named “Disarm Hate Act” – which would mandate kick-your-door-in, murder-you-and-your-family disarmament of anyone convicted of participating in any sort of resistance, most assuredly including passive resistance, to the escalating JesuNazi (i.e, “religious”) violence against abortion clinics, anti-Trump-Regime rallies and union-sanctioned picketing.

COMET DISCOVERY KILLS LAST HOPE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL SALVATION. Based on the content of modern science fiction, invasion by enlightened aliens is humanity's last remaining hope for rescue from the patriarchal mandate for planetary self-destruction. But now that too is gone forever. (For the philosophical and psychological details of the self-destruction mandate – a variant of which is the USian “better-dead-than-Red” policy – see Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother.)

THE CLARITY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MIND: Paul Street's suggestions for “12 Blasphemous Thoughts” to contemplate this summer as the Trump Regime marches us in lockstep toward boastfully acknowledged tyranny.

*****

NO RANT (OR ANY OTHER EDITORIAL COMMENT) TODAY FOR TWO REASONS. One, the news is so breathtakingly bad, no comment is necessary. Two, because this is the week I produce the monthly newsletter for the 90-unit lower-income senior housing complex in which I live, I simply don't have time to be contemplative – especially about events that are already paralytically depressing.

06/11/2017

BUILDING SOLIDARITY – WHO'S A COMRADE AND WHO ISN'T (an essay not a rant): As I said two days ago, Sophia Burns' “Why Suffer for Social Justice” – linked here again because it is such vital reading for all of us involved in the struggle against Capitalism – is one of the most hauntingly provocative pieces I have read in many years. It speaks to me personally with such power it has triggered introspection of an intensity I at age 77 assumed was decades behind me, though that is another story for another time – if indeed I ever find the courage to write it. In any case, what we are discussing tonight – an important part of what makes Burns' work newsworthy – is its exemplary usefulness in helping us distinguish between real or potential comrades and those whose hostility to socialist revolution (whether the hostility is disclosed or not) renders them at best nothing more than temporary allies and at worse co-optors or agents provocateur – which again underscores the relevance of Lev Bronstein's 1905 dictum that in every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana. It also underscores the relevance of a statement the soon-afterward-assassinated Malcolm X made 54 years ago:

“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political 'football game' that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.”

Cited by black journalist and entertainer Chauncey DeVega in a recent Salon piece entitled, “Bernie is wrong and Malcolm was right: What white liberals so often get wrong about racism and Donald Trump,” the text in which it appears is easily dismissable as yet another predictable effort by a “progressive” bourgeois publication to remain relevant in an increasingly revolutionary era. (The same can be said of Current Affairs – basic subscription fee $40 per year – its URL sent me by a regular Dispatches reader, to whom my heartfelt thanks.) But despite the ideological failure of such journalism, I am convinced its disclosures often serve a vital role in preparing public consciousness for the pivotal realization the overthrow of Capitalism is essential to human survival. That said, once we substitute “Working Class” for “Negro,” we realize Malcolm X is describing precisely the strategy and tactics by which the Democratic (sic) Party continues to betray all of us 99 Percenters regardless of our race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age or disability. So understood, it becomes a call for solidarity akin to that voiced by Burns:

“You don’t get justice with the politics of guilt. You get it with the politics of solidarity. Freedom doesn’t come from shame. It comes from treating an injury to one as an injury to all (because for the working class, it objectively is). ¶Do you want social change? Don’t look to the social justice subculture. If, like most of us, you’re a worker (paid or unpaid), help build your class’s power instead. ¶How else do you think you'll get free?”

While some might object that Burns is writing primarily for and about people with medically recognized disabilities, we should bear in mind that under Capitalism, all of us 99 Percenters are socioeconomically disabled – which even if we are in mental and/or physical prime mandates our solidarity with all other disabled people regardless of their disabling condition. Thus by revealing what she aptly labels “the social justice subculture” as another of the (deliberately deceptive, relentlessly co-optive) subsets of Capitalism, Burns alerts us all to yet another of the ploys by which self-proclaimed “progressives” undermine the cause of revolution.

A similar albeit more generalized counter-revolutionary function is performed by the Democratic (sic) Party, which is once again serving its Capitalist benefactors by betraying us 99 Percenters, particularly women. Obviously in our escalating fight against USian JesuNazism, we can no more trust the euphemism-cloaked Democrats – the true hypocrisy of whom is typified by the additional Bill-and-Hillary atrocities that just now came into proper focus – than we can trust their ever-more-blatantly tyrannical Republican Party partners.

To reiterate, the lesson here is that though our fight compels us to join hands in a united front with as many people as possible, we must for our own individual and collective survival learn to distinguish between true comrades and those who are useful only as throw-away allies – and to be very wary of the pseudo-solidarity seductively promised by the latter. But how do we distinguish pseudo-solidarity from the real thing? We pay close attention to whether it tokenizes or objectifies us – whether it forces us into the role Burns describes as “being a prop.” Thus I would urge anyone who feels they are being objectified to assert their suspicion. The response to such an assertion almost invariably tells us whether we are props or genuine sisters and brothers in openly acknowledged class struggle. Indeed distinguishing between pseudo-solidarity and the real thing may, at this historical juncture, be among our most important tasks. For without true solidarity – just as Burns says – how will we ever get free?

ON THE SOCIOECONOMIC ORIGINS OF JESUNAZISM: a diatribe ofgodsplanin that ignores the genocidal history of Christianity but is nevertheless worth reading because it does a fairly adequate job of tracing Biblical Capitalism and its prosperity gospel to its origins in the schemes of the One Percent and their executive-and-professional-class whore-vassals to subjugate all the rest of us. Meanwhile a professor risks tenure and perhaps life itself by courageously denouncing USian conservatism – which let us not forget is JesuNazism's prime enabler – as “a godddamn death machine.”

AN ANTHOLOGY ON THE REICHSTAG-FIRE ASPECTS OF THE SO-CALLED WAR ON TERROR: Global Research publishes a damning quintet of reports discussing how the One Percent uses Islamic terrorism to leverage Capitalism's relentless march toward global tyranny. These disclosures also suggest terrorism has become not just a product but a profit center– and as with anything else that adds to the Capitalists' already obscene wealth, we the ever-more-oppressed people pay the ever-more-deadly price.

*****

PERSONAL NOTES ON BOURGEOIS MEDIA AND CENSORSHIP BY PRICE: The $40 annual cost of a basic Current Affairs subscription is about one third the sum my very limited income allows me for food each month. Thus it – or subscription to any comparable publication – is forever beyond my reach. Moreover, with at least half the USian Homeland population now definitively “low income,” censorship by price – a favorite Capitalist method of nullifying freedom of inquiry – guarantees most of us 99 Percenters will never see Current Affairs content nor its counterparts in comparable publications no matter how relevant it might be to our circumstances.

There are only two ways to combat the oppression that is censorship by price. One occurs accidentally, as when someone happens upon relevant material – say in a copy of The New Yorker in a doctor's-office waiting room – and sends the material to a properly attentive member of the alternative press. The other nullification of censorship by price takes place when news sites such as Reader Supported News orCommon Dreams lift material from prohibitively priced bourgeois journals and republish it themselves – which is why, despite the extent to which these two sites in particular have become mouthpieces for the Hillaryite faction of the Democratic [sic] Party, they remain valuable information sources and should receive the greatest financial support the public can muster.

Note also that publications such as Current Affairs are never targeted for suppression no matter what they publish. Why? Two reasons. One, because our overlords and their vassal-whores regard bourgeois readerships as sufficiently restrained by Capitalist bondage – mortgages, student loans etc. – to be immune to revolutionary agitation. Two, because the continued existence of such publications – never mind they are priced beyond the reach of nearly all USian workers – perpetuates the Big Lie of a “free press.”

This apparent tolerance is in decided contrast to the One Percent's view of the genuine alternative press, the readership of which is deemed dangerously untrustworthy, which is why such media is routinely attacked by everything from local advertising boycotts to far more malevolent campaigns such as the Central Intelligence Agency's Operation Chaos. http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html

Hence again my gratitude to the reader who sent me the Current Affairs URLs.